AT&T chief warns on internet costs
In a wonderful little article over at the Financial Times website (see link below) there is an article about the chairman and CEO of AT&T and his plan for making more money…I mean…getting better return on investment.Ã He’s wanting to charge big websites (and what exactly defines ‘big’ is not mentioned…more on that in a minute) to provide access to his customers.Ã Let me sum that up, cuz it doesn’t make any sense to me either: He wants to continue charging consumers for access to the internet, and then wants to charge companies like Google and Yahoo! for the ability to provide content to the consumers.Ã Well, more exactly a certain quality of service.
So the people who want to provide high-quality services to people are going to have to pay more money to get guarenteed delivery service.Ã Why then is this a bad idea you ask?Ã Well, if I want to put a home movie up on a personal web server which I pay for and the QoS policy set up by AT&T is such that is will only deliver movie files if you have paid them money (which I have obviously not done), then my movie is not available to friends and family!Ã Not to mention that services which might be free now (such as google video) will have to either go away, or be a pay service!
Now, about this lovely ROI argument.Ã There is a misconception that it costs money for the fibre lines to be in the ground.Ã It cost money for them to be put in the ground, and it costs money to run the equipment they are connected to – but it does not cost money for them to be sitting in the ground (unless there are lease agreements, but that usually doesn’t happen to the phone company since they already had space in the air and there is a push to move them underground).Ã I am not seeing any services provided by the fibre from the the phone company.Ã I do not have fibre to my house.Ã If I did I would be setting up a home business to run my web servers from there instead of paying someone who does have fibre access to house them for me!
I might be willing to pay some more money for more features (read bandwidth) than I currently get now, but I certainly do not think that I should have to pay more for existing content just because a few big-name telcos want to get more money!
FT.com / Companies – AT&T chief warns on internet costs
I think that the real issue that peopl are missing is that really makes this stupid is that the ISPs already pay for the use of those lines in the ground. AT&T is going to have on heck of a time sending an invoice to Microsoft for providing service packs to users over the Internet. They will have to go after the ISPs that actually provide the connections to the lines. Another thing to keep in mind is that AT&T is not the only player in the laid wire market. I’ve not seen MCI, Sprint, or Verizon make any move on this (doesn’t mean they haven’t thought about it though). I think that Ma-Bell is trying to come back and someone is going to back hand her back into place. Either that, or I’ll just start sending them invoices for the extraneous content of theirs that is taken up my precious bandwidth.